Santa Barbara County Executive Officer Mona Miyasato’s long-simmering impatience with Sheriff Bill Brown’s multimillion-dollar cost overruns for four of the past five years bubbled politely over as she notified the supervisors this Tuesday that she has assigned the county’s auditor to examine why the sheriff’s overtime costs keep rising as the number of vacant sworn positions has dropped dramatically.
In the past year, Miyasato noted, the number of deputies who clocked in more than 1,000 overtime (OT) hours increased from eight in 2019 to 55 last year. On average, she reported, the number of hours coded for OT jumped by 74 percent between 2019 and 2024; that translates to an average per-deputy bump in OT hours from 258 in 2019 to 448 last year.
Less than a month after county supervisors signed off onto this year’s budget in June, they discovered that the Sheriff’s Office would need an unanticipated infusion of $4.2 million to cover overtime costs that accrued last year…